Perníková chaloupka: A Former Hunting Lodge and Gingerbread Museum in Czechia
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Czechia
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page14 sections
History
Perníková chaloupka is a former hunting lodge in Ráby, Czechia, built in 1882 for aristocratic parforce hunting gatherings on the slope of Kunětická hora. Parforce hunting was mounted sport in which hounds pursued quarry along a designated course, and the lodge provided accommodation and a setting for entertaining distinguished guests. Since the 1990s, the property has often been confused with the protected Renaissance hunting lodge associated with the Pernstein family in Ráby.
Aristocratic hunting lodge
Richard von Drasche-Wartinberg inherited the Pardubice estate with Kunburg from his father in 1881. The following year, he commissioned the lodge as a representative residence for guests attending his parforce hunts. Franz Schmoranz the Younger designed, constructed, and furnished the building within one year.
The lodge stood within Kunětický les, where Drasche-Wartinberg also established a park containing valuable foreign trees, particularly Douglas firs and other firs. Its original arrangement included 25 living rooms and eight servants’ rooms, supported by a service building with stables and a manager’s apartment, as well as a gatekeeper’s house near the western entrance.
Expropriation and changing ownership
After Czechoslovakia was established, Drasche-Wartinberg’s real estate was expropriated on 16 June 1919 under Act No. 215/1919. In October 1922, the lodge, Kunětický les, the inn at Hradiště na Písku, and other properties passed to František Aschenbrenner, general director of the Moravian Agricultural and Industrial Bank in Brno, and his wife Marie.
Miloslava Sudková of Bílá Třemešná bought the lodge, its outbuildings, and the surrounding forests in November 1938. She converted the property into a pension and sanatorium with 28 rooms for one to four people and associated common rooms, leasing its operation to her brother-in-law Jaroslav Sudek. The composer Josef Bohuslav Foerster stayed there repeatedly in 1941 and 1942.
Wartime and socialist uses
Despite the operator’s opposition, the property served for two years from September 1942 as a recreation home for the Children’s Evacuation Program and the Hitler Youth. The Children’s Evacuation Program relocated children from areas threatened by Allied bombing to safer rural locations, while the Hitler Youth was the youth organization of Nazi Germany.
After the February 1948 coup, the property was expropriated and nationalized again. Between 1953 and 1955, the lodge operated as a boarding school for the specialist training institution of the State Labour Reserves. The Sisters of the Divine Redeemer, a Catholic religious congregation, later ran an old people’s home there and, from 1965, a social-care institution for young people with intellectual disabilities.
The grounds were newly fenced from the 1960s. The religious sisters were required to leave at the beginning of the 1980s, after which the institution continued under state administration. During that decade, the newer White House was enlarged with a large kitchen and dining room.
Restitution and the museum
After the Velvet Revolution, the largely peaceful political transformation of 1989 that ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the neglected and fenced property was restituted in the 1990s to Petr Mlejnek, a grandson of Miloslava Sudková. When the care institution moved in August 2000 to the newly built Domov pod Kuňkou on the southern edge of Ráby, the lodge remained unused for several years.
Kam na Pardubicku s.r.o. leased the grounds in 2003. The Šorm business family gradually repaired the deteriorated buildings and exercised its right of pre-emption. Since 2003, the lodge has housed a gingerbread museum. The property is now associated with the Muzeum perníku, operated by the registered association Kralovství Perníku z. s., which presents the complex through themed rooms and storybook imagery as a gingerbread house.
A spatial plan adopted by Ráby’s municipal council in 2014 reduced the public and commercial areas permitted within the lodge grounds to one quarter of their previous extent, favoring the RBC 1758 biocenter outside the property. The owners regarded the measure as the legal basis for a possible third expropriation, leading to a dispute with the municipality. A petition with 20,300 signatures seeking an amendment to the plan was submitted to the mayor in October 2017. In November of that year, the Constitutional Court in Brno ruled unlawful the deletion of audio recordings from a municipal council meeting after an application to annul the plan had been filed.
Remains
The complex occupies the southwestern slope of the 307-metre Kunětická hora in Kunětický les, on the right side of the road from Ráby to Němčice. It forms part of a fenced woodland property containing the former lodge, its service buildings, the White House, and the former gatekeeper’s house.
Former hunting lodge
Wooden chalet building
House no. 38 is a wooden lodge in the Swiss chalet style, a nineteenth-century mode characterized by chalet-like timber construction, carved details, and a substantial stone base. The building stands on a high stone base. A staircase on its western side rises to a carved gallery at first-floor level, while two projecting sections, called risalits, extend from the eastern side. A risalit is an outward-projecting part of a building that usually continues through one or more stories.
Interior transformation
Much of the historic interior furnishing was lost while the lodge served as a boarding school and care institution during the second half of the twentieth century. The building was adapted in a 1970s hospital style. From 2003 onward, its interior was redesigned as a fairytale gingerbread house, while historic wall paintings on the first floor were restored.
Service and residential buildings
Stable and manager’s house
House no. 58, the former stable and manager’s house, was built northwest of the lodge as part of its original service arrangement. Its historic interior fittings were largely lost during the building’s later institutional use, and it was adapted in the 1970s in a hospital style.
Gatekeeper’s house
The former gatekeeper’s house, house no. 40, stands directly beside the road and belongs to the complex. It occupied the entrance area west of the lodge.
White House
House no. 151, known as the White House, was built southeast of the lodge in the 1970s as a modern office and operational building. It received a large kitchen and dining room in the 1980s and is now used as an association house, pension, and training center.
Gingerbread museum spaces
The museum’s themed spaces include the Děd Vševěd information center, the gingerbread city of Perníkov, a prison for gingerbread thieves, Ježibaba’s gingerbread workshop, a mysterious forest, a honey paradise, and an honor room for people named Jan and Marie. Other spaces are presented as Heaven and Hell and as a consulate of the Wallachian Kingdom. Fairytale figures associated with the Brothers Grimm, including Little Red Riding Hood, also appear within the museum presentation.
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